I just created a space for patients, caregivers, and professionals interested in MentalHealth. I hope for this group to become a space where people across the spectrum of Mental Health can find a well-meaning community to connect, discuss and collaborate with. Feel free to join in :)

Consumer computing platform changes aren’t straight lines, they’re waves. PC, internet and mobile were the first 3 waves, and each was faster, larger and more disruptive than the last. Now the fourth wave of virtual, augmented and mixed reality is bearing down on us, so let’s dive in. The water’s fine.

Waves come in setsGrowing up in the surf teaches you a thing or two about waves and how to read them. One of the things you learn is that waves are not solitary creatures, and they always come in sets. So the fourth wave is actually a set of three overlapping waves: virtual reality, augmented reality and mixed reality.Virtual reality places users inside the virtual world, immersing them. Augmented reality overlays virtual objects on the user’s real world, augmenting it. Although closely related to AR, mixed reality anchors apparently solid virtual objects in the user’s real world. So they appear to the user as real.Waves break differentlyThe first three platform waves came increasingly quickly, reached greater heights, and broke differently each time. The PC wave took almost 20 years from the launch of the Apple II before it accelerated in the 90s. Fixed broadband internet took less than five years from launch before hitting its inflection point in the noughties. Smartphones took only 3 years after the launch of the iPhone before they began to rocket, producing much of the tech innovation that is commercially successful today.Today AR/VR is still in the first of the four stages of tech market development (hype cycle, facing reality, liftoff, sustainable market). Its installed base, from low-end Cardboard through high-end HoloLens, is unlikely to top 100 million units until 2018 (note: that is units installed in total, not annual sales). There will be a few billion dollars revenue this year, a progressive ramp in 2017, and a hoped for inflection point in 2018. So what will cause the fourth wave to break?The reality setThe waves within the new reality have different but related dynamics driving their scale and timing.Virtual reality’s two forms (mobile and console/PC) have different drivers, despite being similar in many ways. Console/PC VR delivers the best user experience today, but is constrained by a potential host platform installed base of 40 million Sony PS4 consoles and less than 20 million VR capable PCs globally. Those numbers will grow in coming years as the cost of VR hardware and host platforms comes down, but some subset of a potential 60 million host platforms (and counting) indicates a deep rather than broad market in the long term.Mobile VR will be the growth market in terms of VR’s installed base, with prices from $99 down to free – free is a pretty compelling price point. The question for mobile VR today is that the experience does not match console/PC VR, but that will continue to change in coming years. As smartphone manufacturers face slow growth and squeezed margins, core roadmaps are now focused on beefing up mobile VR quality as a source of growth.Augmented and mixed reality face different challenges to their virtual cousins, and are 18 to 24 months behind VR in terms of consumer market readiness. So today AR/MR [...]

Compared with other industry events, expectations are sky-high at design conferences. “Dentists, physicists, sociologists, taxidermists all meet to find out what’s new in their specialties. So do designers, but they are not happy about it,” Ralph Caplan former director of the Aspen International Design Conference once said to Eye Magazine, explaining the great challenge of creating extraordinary experiences...

Reminder: Almost 90 per cent of the revenue of the company formerly known as Google — grandly rebranded Alphabet this fall, even if everyone, including me, is still going to call Google Google — comes from advertising.

Seen from that perspective, it’s entirely unsurprisingly how multi-pronged a push Google is making to stoke the VR market right now. I’m bundling virtual reality and augmented reality together here, into one general ‘sight-disrupting’ package. Sure there are differences in immersion level between AR and VR but in general the two technologies are about injecting something digital into a user’s field of view. And Google plays in both areas, skewing more towards the AR side right now.

Firstly there’s Google’s unloved face wearable, Glass. Publicly confirmed in April 2012, and made available to developers the following year. It’s stalled as a product right now but is still apparently under development. A patent emerged recently showing a glasses-less version of Glass, still with a tiny screen positioned above the wearer’s left eye (as my TC colleague Romain Dillet pointed out, this version of Glass resembles a monocle.)

In an interesting lemons-to-lemonade development, plastic ocean waste has served as material for a 3D-printed shoe. The makers are Adidas. Together with Parley for the Oceans, a group fighting ocean pollution, the shoe concept ...

The opening credits on most TV shows often come with a side order of lies. The main offender is the "written-by" credit. It's a suspiciously narrow designation that suggests one or possibly two story-artisans painstakingly handcrafted every plot-point, every turn, and every string of sparkling banter that make up the episode all on their own. Barring some exceptions, what actually happens is an entire writers room full of interlocking personality types forms like a comedy Voltron to pitch and polish ideas until one or two writers have enough material to go off and write up a draft. It's a process that's known as breaking a story, and it is incredibly difficult to do.

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